The piece, headlined “Inside the campaign: How Mitt Romney stumbled,” leaves readers viewing the campaign as disorganized, which is all the more surprising given Romney’s experience running companies and the Salt Lake City Olympics.

The story, by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, two of Washington’s most authoritative political reporters, details how problems with Romney’s acceptance speech at the GOP convention emerged and provides more background into how Clint Eastwood wound up on the stage talking to an empty chair.

Much of the criticism from Romney’s aides and friends in the piece is directed at Stuart Stevens, a top aide to Romney who the reporters describe as having “a mad-professor aura.” But the authors also write: “To pin recent stumbles on Stevens would be to overlook Romney’s role in all this.”

Some highlights from Politico’s piece:

The campaign tapped multiple writers to work on drafts for Romney’s acceptance speech at the convention in August. One of the speeches referenced the war in Afghanistan — an issue that Romney did not mention in his speech. The speech that was ultimately given was written by Stevens and Romney.

Stevens is serving as Romney’s “chief strategist, chief ad maker and chief speechwriter,” the authors write. “It would be as if George W. Bush had run for president in 2000 with one person playing the roles of Karl Rove, Mark McKinnon and Michael Gerson. Or if on the Obama campaign of 2008, David Axelrod had not been backed up by Jim Margolis, Robert Gibbs and Jon Favreau.”

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